


of silence

by sno_white0



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Angst and Feels, Awkward Romance, Eventual Relationships, F/F, F/M, Family, Fluff, M/M, Other, Psychoanalysis, Realistic, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-25
Updated: 2019-03-08
Packaged: 2019-11-05 16:37:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17922452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sno_white0/pseuds/sno_white0
Summary: "Outside I'm content, but inside I'm screaming. And those screams are alone."





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> A/N : The characters of this fic belong to Masashi Kishimoto. Timeline and twists to the original canon are entirely based on assumptions. Expect random changes!

 

A pale figure remained silent against the harsh wind and heavy downpour. The soaked form stood painfully still as it fixated its blank gaze at the body slumped on the stone ground to his right, seemingly not bothered by the numerous chakra signatures rushing to his location. 

 

The first sting of tears in his eyes mixed with the unceasing force of the rain. As the first drop that touched the earth colored it red, several ninja landed in front of him. The surrounding nin seemed to increase in number as their restless forms approached him, but the slowly buzzing sound starting to echo in his ears (Or is it my head?), blurring vision and thunderous rain made them practically non-existent.

 

" - not absolve him of his crimes - "

 

" - got to finally kill his - "

 

" - don't understand, Baa-chan!"

 

_Baa-chan? I used to have one of those._

 

A familiar blonde head suddenly appeared in front of him and gripped his dislocated right shoulder and the fractured left arm he got from the previous battle. Hands shook him worriedly, but the numbness starting to spread inside of him took away all sense of pain. He looked at the frantic blonde and idly noticed the rain making his hair lose its spikiness. It made his bangs seem longer as it stuck on the sides of his face.

 

_I wonder if the rain will end._

 

Then began the familiar suffocating feeling of a cold weight settling in his chest and a forceful one in his stomach. The next pull in his gut startled his lungs into a breathless gasp and his heart began to constrict. No matter how much air he breathed in it seemed as if no oxygen was getting into his system. His head was starting to feel stuffed with what he'd always used to imagine as condensed blood and his vision became slightly unfocused.

 

" - always be a traitor to - !"

 

He flickered his eyes for anything he could see within distance, but no matter how far he tried to reach he felt as if the world itself was running away from him. That feeling of discord he so loathed was once again beginning to creep at him that he shut his eyes tightly. That toxic, graveling sensation traveled down his lower body, making his hands twitch.

  

He clenched his fingers together until he could vaguely hear the bones snap and feel the warmth of blood trickle from his palms, yet the pain barely did anything but softly whisper at his senses. He clenched his jaw tight as the stabbing sensation in his gut pulled harder, but it was nothing compared to the buzzing harshly intensifying in his head.

 

The sensation of floating on air and drowning in water at the same time continued to push and pull at him from opposite sides.

 

Ignoring the shattered form of his hands, he shakily gripped his head and harshly pulled at the strands. The blood soaking his palms dribbled down his forehead and his scalp felt like it was being ripped from his skull, but he didn't care. It was too much. The pain was too much. Everything, all of him was too painful . _Toomuchtoomuch_ \- _TOO FUCKING MUCH._

 

"-Sasuke-kun-?!"

 

  _enoughHE L P - ... mE_

 

 "-wrong with him-?"

 

 His breathing grew even more ragged and the sudden increase of force from the rain seemed to end the slightest hold he has on his form. His body then felt so cold and numb that he couldn't help his fall down the ground.

 

 His entire body trembled at the force of all the pain and he almost lost control of the blood-curdling screams he kept tightly bound inside him, hidden behind layers upon layers of the carefully crafted person the world wanted to see. And yet for the first in his life since he witnessed the deaths of all his relatives he wanted to -

 

  _Why did you have to leave me behind?_

 

 The thought gave him the slightest push back to reality, and he vaguely felt several hands gripping his form. He felt boneless, so tired enough to want to just shut everything off and _let go_...But his ears identified a particularly loud, familiar voice shouting, panicking among the numerous others yelling over each other. He wanted to face the person shouting in his ear and say the words he'd vowed to himself he will never utter again - back to that day of hundreds of coffins lying side by side in a single funeral setting.

 

  
"-why can't I heal him-?!"

 

 

"-let go of me-!"

 

 

"-not responding-"

 

 

But the buzzing in his head turned even louder and the pain increased impossibly worse, that his mouth opened in its own accord, screaming a silent cry. Blood poured out of his mouth and more red tears flowed and pooled at his eyes. The pain heightened even more so that he lost all feeling to his limbs and his head limply dropped sideways. His hands fell from its grip on his head and he slowly opened his eyes.

 

 

"-on't you dare fucking die on me, bastard-!"

 

 

 _I want to die_.

 

 

The sight of his brother with the most peaceful expression on his face greeted him. It looked as if all the world's burdens were lifted from him that it prompted his own to its first smile he'd done since that day of the massacre. It was the barest upturn of his lips but it felt like the heavens had finally granted him the biggest wish he'd ever dreamed of.

 

 

_Why didn't you just kill me too?_

 

 

The voices from around him somehow began to fade away and as the pain turned into its harshest yet, a trail of red tears slowly traveled down from his eye. He took one last look at his brother, the one person his whole life became the center of and -

 

 

 

 

_I've finally reached you_

 

 

 

 

 

 

The pain of being unmade wasn't so lonely anymore.

 

 

 


	2. Chapter One: Just (a boy)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "One of the hardest things you will ever have to do... is to grieve the loss of a person who is still alive."

 

 

 

 

The ghosts of the orphanage haunt him.

 

 

 

 

But it wasn't terrifying, not really.

 

 

 

 

He sees them at precisely eighteen hundred hours, when the matron **,** Chieko-san, gathers the children for dinner and she pretends not to see the empty chair to Ishi-kun's left.

 

 

He hears them when their exhausted caretaker, Fuyumi-san, does the roll call for writing sessions every morning and her quivering voice hitches to a stop at another unanswered name.

 

 

He could feel them at night when the curfew ticks by and the hard thumps of rushing feet no longer shakes the bed above his own.

 

 

But above all that, he senses them the most when the other kids continue to play games and laugh freely, as if they didn't notice their numbers once again dwindled to three less than last week's.

 

 

He wonders if the other children were really that ignorant, or whether they, just like their caretakers, simply chose to accept it as a part of life and moved on.

 

 

He also wonders why the ghosts seem to be attached to him, of all people. One of their more impatient caretakers, Tadashi-san told him in an irritated voice that _Ghosts aren't real,_ _Sorakō-kun_ , but he disagrees. One of his books, _Zashiki-warashi,_ said that the children who experienced non-peaceful death would continue to live as ghosts and haunt the people they knew by in turn, not letting them live their lives and never letting them move on from them.

 

 

He can't seem to forget Nobu-kun's singing during kanji sessions, nor could he forget little Maiko-chan's gap-toothed smiles whenever he gives her half of his measly lunch of porridge and fruit. Several inquiries involving the other kids just cemented this belief for him ( _"Ishi-kun, do you remember what Maiko-chan's favorite-" "Who?"_ ), and the caretakers' pursed lips whenever he asked didn't help discourage this either.

 

 

But he supposed he can't really blame them. The adults often choose to forget the things that bring them unnecessary pain, and the other children can't really comprehend loss yet. And in their life within the orphanage, he quickly learned at a young age that their caretakers had rather gotten used to children becoming casualties of war.

 

 

Which is why, the caretakers had a too-used eye on when they did another headcount during their last evacuation drill to the next make-shift housing for Tanoshi Orphanage. Explosions where wrecking the lands outside their hide-out, the kids where shivering and sniffling, and yet when the next morning came, they all woke up to Chieko-san's monotone voice calling for breakfast. No one mentioned that there were only twenty four plates on the table, and in return their caretakers gave them all extra hours of playtime after that.

 

 

With a tinge of envy, he thought, _Why not the other kids?_ Does that mean he really is somehow different - like the other orphans bully him for by being too quiet and too nerdy - or is he really just plain weird? It wasn't his fault that his almost eidetic memory (as Fuyumi-san once described him with shock) prevented him from easily forgetting the orphanage ghosts, just like how it wasn't his fault that the worn out books interested him more than the other children's eighth round of tag.

 

 

Thinking of his books brought his attention back to the one open on his lap. _Hi no Ishi_ by Senju Hashirama. It was one of the few books donated to the orphanage a few months prior. One of the ghosts lend it to him back when Tanoshi Orphanage had still been stationed at Kuudate Village, a small, quiet town located at the North-Eastern part of the Land of Fire.

 

 

He reads out loud the passage on the page, making sure to carefully enunciate the words just like Fuyumi-san taught him, "... the entire village is like a large family unit and every Konoha shinobi with the Will of Fire loves, believes, cherishes, and fights to protect the village - "

 

"- as previous generations had done before them," a voice much deeper than his youthful one suddenly overlaps his and he blinks upward.

 

 

A smile crinkles at him so gently and kindly that he gives a beaming one in return. The man crouched beside him and as he studied him intently for a few moments, he also took the time to observe the adult.

 

 

He was a lean man with fair skin and tousled inky black hair. He wore a black, high-collared long-sleeved shirt and pants with the ends wrapped in white bandages that went to his feet - on which he wore black sandals. Tied on his forehead was a strip of black cloth containing a metal plate inscribed with some sort of symbol he was unfamiliar with.

 

 

The man's attire looked so foreign compared to the other adults in the orphanage that he wondered if he should be alarmed. The man could be a burglar, or even a murderer after all, if he was able to appear seemingly out of nowhere. _Or maybe,_ he thought, _he's a_ ** _real_** _ghost!_

 

 

"What's your name, kid?"

 

 

The soft inquiry snapped him out of his musings and he looked up to the man's earnest onyx eyes. _A murderer wouldn't be so gentle_ , he thought, _nor would a ghost be asking for their target's names_. But then gain, he lived in an orphanage. He couldn't have known anything about the etiquette and processes involved in child murders or actual ghost haunting.

 

 

"I-I don't have one, Oji-san... But Fuyumi-san and Chieko-san and Tadashi-san likes to call me Sorakō because of how I look."

 

 

This got him an amused chuckle,  "I see." The man retrieved a scroll somewhere from his person  and wrote so swiftly that when he blinked, the man was already placing it back to where he got it from. _Wow, so fast!_

 

 

"So you like reading books, Sorakō-kun?" the question effectively distracted him from the question his mouth was already forming and he beamed easily.

 

 

"I do! I love them lots! Especially those about ninjas, they're so _cool_  and they do those awesome - _"_

 

 

"Really? Well, what do you think about becoming one?" the man seemed to be an expert at catching him off guard because his next questions increasingly made him flustered.

 

 

"-Me? But... I'm just-"

 

 

"So you've considered it?"

 

"-e-eh? Well, maybe, but-"

 

 

"Great! Then let's go talk with the matron."  _Wait!_

 

 

"-wait! B-but I'm just-!"

 

 

"Just what?"

 

 

 _I'm just weird Sorakō. The nobody with a lame obsession for books and ghosts._ He couldn't exactly say that to a person he just met - and to an adult at that - so he meekly asks, "Why me?"

 

 

His eyes dropped to the book on his lap and to the last statement he'd been reading on (... _the entire village is like a family unit_...). Family. That was one of the taboo words in the orphanage and something he, like the rest of the other orphans, had long ago given up hope on having.

 

 

"Well, why not?" The response made him figuratively sweat drop. _Is this really how ninjas are like?_

 

 

 _"Besides..._ You're the only four year old I've ever met able to read _kanji_ that fluently. You would make an amazing ninja!"

 

 

"...d-do you really think so?" He hesitantly looked up to the pair of dark, intense eyes beside him and swallowed the sudden lump in his throat. _Family._ Maybe that's something he could have in the ninja world, and not just ghosts that the orphanage forgets about.

 

 

"Of course I do. Now c'mon kid, let's go!"

 

 

Sorakō felt a sharp tug at his wrist and suddenly he was at Chieko-san's office, with the Oji-san speaking a mile a minute to the frazzled matron.

 

 

The next days after found himself dazedly answering his caretakers' questions as a whirlwind of movement seemed to occur all at once ( _"Yes, he was interested in becoming a ninja." " No, he wasn't forced into anything." "Yes, Chieko-san I'm absolutely sure."_ ) _._

 

 

Numerous men and women in the similar foreign clothing as the Oji-san went to and from the orphanage. What was even more unusual, however, was when that same Oji-san as before returned with a horde of animal-masked persons in uniform surrounding an elderly woman dressed in clothing that looked more expensive than all of the orphanage's expenses combined. She wore fine, traditional robes and had her hair up in a tight up-do with complex accessories and pins artistically strewn about.

 

 

She had what looked like a perpetually dour expression on her wrinkled face and after a short, sharp glance at Sorakō,  she addressed the Oji-san with a drawling tone (completely dismissing the dumbfounded, stuttering matron), "Is this the boy?"

 

 

"Hai, Utatane-sama," the Oji-san replied, noticeably more formal and cold compared to how he spoke to him previously.

 

 

The prim woman was now harshly scrutinizing him,  and Sorakō fidgeted as he sat on the office' creaking wooden chair. Despite the drying in his eyes that urges him to blink, he maintained eye contact with the elder and desperately forced away the instinct to shrink in on himself. Sorakō felt like an insignificant worm at the mercy of this woman and intuitively knew that to show any hint of weakness belying his age would be to lose all chance he could get of getting into her good graces.

 

 

What felt like hours or so passed (which, realistically was just less than a minute) before the scrutiny eased into cold indiference and she turned towards the matron. What must have been a silent signal passed because two of the masked men, along with the Oji-san, flashed beside him and then in an instant he was transported to his bunk.

 

 

"Sorakō-chan! Hurry up now, or we'll be late! Pack your things, quickly," the Oji-san chirped at him and _wait, since when did he became Sorakō-chan?_  He was rushed, yes, but it seemed as if no action from him was actually necessary since the masked men packed all of the things his hands remotely aimed at a direction to pick up.

 

 

Five minutes later and he was back in the office, with two bags containing  his few belongings beside him and awkwardly seating himself by his original seat. The atmosphere in the office felt stifling with the oppressive aura the elder was giving off and the matron was pale, trembling slightly at the force of it.

 

 

"Boy," the woman snapped at him. Sorakō jolted in surprise and made to answer, but the elder was already standing and moving to leave. "Say your goodbyes and we shall leave. _Now." You will not_ ** _waste_** _anymore of my time_ , was left unsaid.

 

 

Sorakō scrambled to stand and barely stuttered a,"B-bye, Chieko-san! Thank-!" before he was snatched by one of the masked men and the last he saw of the matron was her slumping in her chair in relief.

 

 

 _Well_ , Sorakō's last thoughts were, _at least the ghosts won't be haunting anyone in the orphanage anymore._

 

 

As the wind whipped at his threadbare clothes, a sharp prick at his neck jabbed his senses and darkness engulfed his vision.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To all those who left kudos and comments, thank you! Rest assured that I read and cherish all of your words, even if I don't reply. I personally feel that the best reply I could ever express to relay my gratitude for your encouragements is to go on and keep writing, so I will! Let's continue on with this journey together! <3


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